Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast - Xavier No. 27

Extremely interesting article. When measured in 2009, media companies that prioritised investment in new technologies were very likely to report significant increases in revenue.
But that is changing. By 2015 this trend was no longer statistically significant. Everybody is doing technology, probably Facebook is doing it better.If investment in technology no longer differentiates winners from losers. What will it be? This year’s study is looking for the roles that strategy, talent and organisational culture play in corporate success. I experienced myself that building a customer centric culture, that is also data rich, is what is bringing the real improvements.

When it comes to culture, try Zappos.com for size. Former CEO Tony Hsieh explains how new employees are selected in this quite original video.

There is a bonus of 3.000 dollars if you quit and leave the company in the first weeks of training. Why? They do not want people who want to do this job just for the paycheck. 3% take the offer. They deliberately choose for this culture.

At Zappos.com they pass on smart and talented people that do not fit into the culture. Even if they are great at adding value.

They make a culture book where every employee can talk about the good and the bad.

What a culture shock in this article. Great personal story that brings to life how innovative WeChat is in China. And how it blends into everybody´s lives, much more so than Facebook does. On Monday, I take the subway. I notice a woman moving methodically down the car, stopping to talk to the other passengers. Is she begging? Testifying? Only when she stops before the woman next to me do I get it: She’s asking for QR scans, trying to get followers for a WeChat official account.

Meanwhile in Nigeria Whatsapp is serving as the primary interaction and transaction mechanism for BalogunMarket.ng. What an amazing pivot in the African ecommerce space.

Over to the United States where mobile is driving media consumption with a plus of 10% in the past few months. That is one extra hour of media per day! Smartphones now total one hour and 39 minutes a day.

Nice video here showing a visit to a data journalist (with weird shirt) from The Guardian. Not surprisingly, journalists working with data must be very rigorous and thorough, he claims, with an ability to clean data and decipher what the story is in a particular dataset. Like any source, data should be treated with scepticism and reporters should be conscious to portray any limitations that the figures might have. Still. Good advice. The European Commission has nearly 2 million euros ready for data-driven news production on European issues. Submit your proposal here.